A apreensão do instante relações entre a literatura e fotografia

Abstract

In this study, through a qualitative survey based upon a bibliographical research, we analyze the inter-relations between literature and still photography, with the intention of discussing the main aspects of resemblance between these two types of arts, apparently very different from one another. Based upon Susan Sontag s (2004) statement that photography is closer to poetry than to any other art, we investigate the historical and aesthetic developments that allow such relation. Our investigation shows that it was after the realistic movement and mainly after the consequences of the radicalization in the use of the literary image by the European avant-gard oriented writers and by the Brazilian modernist poets that the relation between literature and still photography becomes clearer. We analyze particularly a part of the literary production of the Brazilian modernist writer Oswald de Andrade that, through his instant poems or flash-poems , presents in his literature some imagetic characteristics that allow us to compare them to photographic images. But if it is possible to show in literature some photographic elements, an inverse situation can also be detected. That is what an analysis of part of the production of the Brazilian photographer Thomas Farkas may demonstrate, specially in his photos made in the fourth decade of the twentieth century. In them, he reveals, through a subtle game of opposition and combination between light and shadow, that situation that Minor White (2003) call a mirror we can pass through . In Farkas work, the image of a photographer acquires some typical characteristics of a poet s image. And it is exactly when overcomes the mere visual aspects and opens a portal to the world of dreams and imagination that photography may present certain elements that could cause a proximity to poetry. Our research tries to demonstrate, thus, that the relations between literary and photographic images - both worried with the attempt of apprehension of life instants - allow to distinguish in still photography some characteristics that most of the reviewers once admitted that belonged only to the kingdom of literature and, on the other hand, that some writers can use the words in a way that produces results that resemble that of a photographer who presses the shutter of his camera.